OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining. No one can doubt that Chris’s research intent is legitimate – he’s not fooling around here.

[This is my competition entry for the ARCS2015 essay competition hosted at The Winnower. I’m using their excellent WordPress plugin to automagically transfer this post from my blog to their site at the click of a button.] There’s a 1,000-word limit for this competition, so forgive my brevity. I could easily write ten thousand! These are merely a couple of vignettes.

Anyone care to remember how awful and unusable the web interface for accessing the NHM’s specimen records used to be? Behold the horror below as it was in 2013, or visit the Web Archive to see just how bad it was. It’s not even the ‘look’ of it that was the major problem – it was more that it simply wouldn’t return results for many searches. No one I know actually used that web interface because of these issues.

Yesterday, I tried to read a piece of research, relevant to my interests that was published in 1949. Sadly as is usual, I hit a paywall asking me for £30 + tax to read it (I didn’t pay). Hincks, W. D. 1949. IV.—systematic and synonymic notes on passalidae (col.). Annals and Magazine of Natural History 2:56-64.

Today (2015-09-01), marks the public announcement of Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO for short), a new open access journal for all disciplines that seeks to open-up the entire research cycle with some truly novel features I know what you might be thinking: *Another open access journal? Really? * Myself, nor Daniel Mietchen simply wouldn’t be involved with this project if it was just another boring open access journal.

I’ve just read a paper published in Systematic Biology called ‘A Falsification of the Citation Impediment in the Taxonomic Literature’. Having read the full paper many times, including the 64-page PDF supplementary materials file. I’m amazed the paper was published in its current form.

[Update 2015-09-19: since writing this, I notice my open access article has now been unpaywalled at Wiley’s site. No-one from Wiley has reached out to me to explain how, why, or when this happened. No compensation has been offered, nor any apology. I note that all the other articles in the special section, which should also be open access (CC BY) are still on sale, behind a paywall.

I read some sad news on Twitter recently. The Ecological Society of America has decided to publish its journals with Wiley: Whilst I think the decision to move away from their old, unloved publishing platform is a good one. The move to publish their journals with Wiley is a strategically poor one. In this post I shall explain my reasoning and some of the widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of this change.

With a first commit to github not so long ago (2015-04-13), getpapers is one of the newest tools in the ContentMine toolchain. It’s also the most readily accessible and perhaps most immediately exciting – it does exactly what it says on the tin: it gets papers for you en masse without having to click around all those different publisher websites. A superb time-saver.

To prove my point about the way that supplementary data files bury useful data, making it utterly indiscoverable to most, I decided to do a little experiment (in relation to text mining for museum specimen identifiers, but also perhaps with some relevance to the NHM Conservation Hackathon): I collected the links for all Biology Letters supplementary data files.